snow palms - origin and echo

Cat No : vgrcd30

Label : Village Green

Compact Disc

$13.00

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David Sheppard first conceived Snow Palms as a vehicle
for music played on mallet instruments (metallophones, glockenspiels, xylophones, marimbas, etc), devices that have featured intermittently across almost two decades-worth of the multi-instrumentalist’s miscellaneous collaborative projects that include State River Widening, Ellis Island Sound, The Wisdom of Harry and Phelan-Sheppard, among a host of others.Snow Palms’ 2012 debut album Intervals won a sheaf of approving notices for its ineffably cinematic blend of polyrhythmic percussion and richly melodic orchestration, partly achieved in collaboration with arranger-composer Christopher Leary (aka Ochre).

Two years in the making, the follow-up builds on the foundations of its predecessor, with a heavy quotient of metallophones, glockenspiels, and marimbas at its core, but largely eschews the latter’s chamber arrangements in favor of soaring synth-scapes and a palette of spectral ambient and electronic textures.Despite that, Origin and Echo is a more performative record than was Intervals, its eleven organic, kinetic pieces meticulously constructed by Sheppard from initial percussive skeletons largely essayed instinctively, in free time, without click-tracks and with almost no guitar. The album is loosely predicated on themes of mirroring and rebounding, whether physical or metaphorical, inspired by everything from the gravity-defying parabolas of space flight to patterns of human migration and feelings of déjà vu summoned by nostalgic journeys. The results are, by turns, hypnotic (the dreamy, tensile ‘White Shadows’), symphonic (the ever-spiralling, near-anthemic ‘Circling’), propulsive (the inexorably escalating ‘Rite’), immersive (the harp-caressed tintabulations of ‘You Are Here’) and poignant (‘Vostok’s’ aching cosmic synth evocations, the mysterioso soundtrack undulations of ‘Black Snow’…). Along the way, there are nods to the film scores of Thomas Newman, the minimal electronics of Simon Fisher-Turner, John Luther Adams’ vibraphone-based chamber piece ‘In a Treeless Place, Only Snow’, and several works by Japanese composers, especially those of Shimizu Yasuaki, Midori Takada and Ryuichi Sakamoto. While the album is mostly the work of David Sheppard working alone or in tandem with producer Giles Barrett, it also features cameos from previous Snow Palms collaborator Christopher Leary (synthesizers), alongside Emma Winston (Omnichord), Lauri Wuolio (cupola drum) and Village Green label-mate Angèle David-Guillou (keyboards). It arrives two years after Sheppard’s last major release, his debut solo album, 2015’s Vertical Land, which attracted some of the best reviews of his career (“An immersive journey into rhythmic motion and vibrant, transportive texture”, said MOJO; “More entrancing than anything he's recorded to date”, opined Uncut).Also a noted writer, editor and, nowadays, university lecturer, Sheppard’s definitive 2008 Brian Eno study On Some Faraway Beach remains a benchmark in music biography (“…a book that sets new standards for rock biography”, The Guardian).